Which Davidson houses actually justify copper
Davidson is built around its college and has an old centre of tight-lot housing with steady newer building around it. The housing age is less important here than the setting: the town has protected and cultivated its tree cover deliberately for a very long time, and the result is a small town where a large share of houses sit directly beneath substantial mature hardwood rather than beside it. That is a fact about the trees rather than the buildings, and it decides more about gutter work here than the build year does.
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 Davidson itself changes
What drops on these roofs
The heaviest sustained debris load of any town in this service area. Davidson’s canopy is old, dense and deliberately maintained, and on the streets around the college the eaves are well inside the drip line of trees that have been there for generations. This is the one town where we recommend a micro-mesh guard almost by default rather than running the arithmetic first, and where the twice-yearly schedule is genuinely twice yearly, timed to the end of the oak drop rather than to October.
Getting to the gutters
Tight. The older core has narrow lots, houses close to the street and to each other, mature trees between the drive and the elevation, and limited room to set a ladder back at the correct angle. Trailer positioning takes thought, and on some of the college-adjacent streets there is simply no kerbside space during term. It is slower work than the housing size would suggest.