Why the reversal cost matters more in Monroe
The subdivisions are straightforward two-storey work with easy ground and good drive access. The older core is where it gets interesting: tighter lots, houses closer to the street, and a fair number of properties with porches wrapping two elevations, which puts the gutter you actually need to reach above a roof rather than above ground. That is a genuine access question rather than a surcharge, and we would rather establish it on the phone than discover it on the day.
That is worth reading before deciding between the two products people call leaf guard, because the harder a roof is to reach, the more expensive it is to change your mind about what is on it.
A cover that clips over your existing gutter is reversible: removal is $1.50 to $3 a foot and the gutter underneath is untouched. A one-piece system, where the hood and the gutter are a single extruded unit, is not. Taking the hood off means taking the gutter off, because they are the same object, so undoing it is a full replacement, $2 to $4 a foot to remove, then $8 to $17 a foot for a new run. On a 150-foot house that is roughly $1,500 to $3,150 to get back to a conventional gutter, before the access surcharge that Monroe height adds to both halves.
That asymmetry is essentially never mentioned at the point of sale, and it is the single most important fact about this category. So: ask any company quoting a one-piece system what removal would cost, and note whether the answer comes readily.
On the product itself, reverse-curve uses surface tension to carry water around a curved lip into a narrow slot. It works, up to a flow rate. Charlotte peaks at 7.27 inches of rain an hour over a five-minute burst, and past the point where surface tension holds, water leaves the nose in a straight line and goes over the slot entirely. Under willow oak and pine we recommend stainless micro-mesh at $10 to $18 a foot instead: finer aperture, roughly half the price, and it unclips.

What Monroe itself changes
What drops on these roofs
The older core has the mature street planting you would expect of housing that age, with large hardwoods directly over the roofs on several of the streets nearest the centre. The subdivision half is more open and its trees are still well below roof height on many lots. Union County generally is more agricultural and less densely wooded than Mecklenburg, so the debris load across Monroe as a whole is lighter than the metro average, but it is concentrated very unevenly.
The housing in Monroe
Monroe splits almost exactly in half and the two halves want different conversations. Around 37% of the housing went up between 1990 and 2009 in the subdivisions that spread out from the town, and those houses are on original gutter that is now due a downspout review rather than a replacement. Against that, 25.7% predates 1970 and sits in the historic core and the older rental stock, where the gutter has usually been repaired several times by several people and the fascia board underneath carries the accumulated evidence of all of it.