Which Belmont houses actually justify copper
Belmont built nearly twenty textile mills up to 1930 and the villages that housed their workers are still standing and still lived in, alongside newer riverside and infill development from the last fifteen years or so. The mill houses present the single most specific gutter problem in this service area: they were built small, with shallow overhangs, and in many cases with exposed rafter tails rather than a continuous fascia board. There is often nothing behind the gutter to screw a hanger into, which is why so many of them carry gutter fastened in ways that were never going to last.
Copper earns its place on some of that and not on the rest, and we would rather say which before quoting four to five times the aluminium rate. It belongs on genuine period property, where an aluminium K-style run across original eaves detailing is a visible compromise on a building that deserves better, and on architect-specified work where the metal is a deliberate part of the elevation. On modern subdivision housing it performs no better in any way that matters, because an under-drained copper gutter overflows exactly like an under-drained aluminium one. If the appeal is the look, painted aluminium half-round at $16 to $26 a foot gets most of the way there for roughly a third of the money.
Where copper is right, the specification decides everything. Copper is a noble metal and aluminium is not, so a copper gutter on aluminium hangers makes the hanger the actively corroding half of a galvanic cell, wet, every time it rains, for years. The gutter stays immaculate and the bracket wastes away, and in fifteen years the run comes off a house whose owner was expecting a lifetime. Copper or bronze hangers, copper or stainless fasteners, copper downspouts and straps, and soldered joints rather than sealant.
One check specific to the property rather than the town: copper runoff corrodes bare aluminium and galvanised steel below it, so anything downstream on the elevation (flashings, a porch roof, an existing downspout) gets looked at before we hang a foot of it.

What Belmont itself changes
What drops on these roofs
The mill villages have mature street planting on small close-set lots, so canopy sits almost immediately over the roofs and the eaves are well inside the drip line. The newer riverside development is open and lightly treed. Belmont sits at the confluence of the Catawba and the South Fork, and the river corridors carry heavier and more varied vegetation than the town away from the water.
Getting to the gutters
The mill-village streets are tight: houses close together, small lots, limited room to set a ladder at a proper angle on side elevations, and frequently a neighbour’s property within a few feet. It is slower work and we price it as such rather than pretending it is equivalent to subdivision access. The newer riverside housing is conventional and easy, though several properties sit on the fall towards the water with a taller elevation on the river side.