LEWISTON – When the water heater went out at 75 Maple St. this summer, the residents couldn’t call the landlord. There isn’t one.

They didn’t panic, either.

“One of us had to call, and we had someone come out and replace it,” resident Ari Rosenberg said. “That’s it.”

What might have been a crisis in any other downtown Lewiston tenement was no big deal for Rosenberg and building mates, members of the Faire Op Bande a Part, the city’s first housing cooperative.

The residents, six in total, all pay monthly rent to the cooperative for rooms in their robin-egg blue, three-story, three-apartment building at the end of Bates Street on Maple.

But they also own shares of the building and the cooperative, a registered Maine corporation. And as owners, they have a say in the building’s fate – how it’s maintained, how much rent they pay and how blown water heaters get handled.

Money for the water heater came from the group’s emergency fund, one of several they created when they incorporated last fall. They didn’t have to wait for an out-of-state landlord to respond or worry about cobbling together money to pay for repairs.

“It feels good, because it is our money,” Rosenberg said. “It’s money we’ve earned and saved, and it’s going back into our building. And it’s staying in our community.”

It’s worked so well, they hope it can become a model for redeveloping other downtown tenements.

“We’ve done the hard work, kind of created the template,” Saddlemire said. “We hope someone else can come along and do the same thing.”

Rosenberg, 23, shares the three-bedroom unit on the second floor with Sherie Blumenthal, 27. Craig Saddlemire, 25, and Denise Dill, 26, share the first floor. And on the third floor, 55-year-old Dan Warner shares the apartment with girlfriend Sheila Vinal. Each unit pays the same rent, $625 per month.

That covers the mortgage and shared utilities – natural gas heat and hot water, water, sewer and common electricity – as well as maintenance. The residents are responsible for their own units’ electricity, cable, telephone and Internet. That’s not a problem, they say. Only Warner and Vinal on the third floor have a landline telephone or a television. They don’t worry about parking because none of them own cars.

“It’s one of the reasons we wanted to stay downtown,” Blumenthal said. “Everything we need is close by.”

Rosenberg, Saddlemire, Dill and Blumenthal began talking about the idea last fall. They modeled their group after a similar housing cooperative in Bath and began looking for properties.

“My original idea was to find a building with commercial space on the ground floor, that we could use to house a shop or something,” Saddlemire said. “But we couldn’t really find anything that fit.”

They settled on the Maple Street building this winter. It was owned by Coastal Enterprises, and Warner and Vinal were the only tenants at the time. The four invited them to join, and they accepted.

“I don’t own a home because it’s easier not to,” Warner said. “But the idea for a cooperatiave is good. You get more say who moves in and what happens. So it’s easier, too.”

They named their creation the Faire Op Bande a Part – the name was inspired by a 1964 French film – and created a logo complete, inexplicably, with marching badgers playing musical instruments.

Both logo and name are whimsical and a bit silly, but the project has demanded serious work from its members. They’ve had to school themselves on financing and contract law, home insurance and home repair.

“It felt almost like a second job,” Saddlemire said. “We had to meet and go over contracts, and figure out how to incorporate and all of that.”

And it doesn’t stop. They meet monthly to discuss the business of being de facto landlords; how much money do they have in their emergency fund, what maintenance projects do they need to deal with now and which can be postponed for a month or so. They plan an annual meeting to go over the previous year’s financials and set rent for the coming months.

Each is assigned general maintenance work – keeping the building’s central hallway clean and swept or shoveling sidewalks, for example.

“But we do have a stake in keeping it nice,” Saddlemire said. “It’s our building, and that makes it different from some other rental situations. We have a reason to care.”

They try to get together informally each week, making pizzas or sushi. It’s a way to keep in touch and make sure they’re working together.

The cooperative has allowed them to keep doing what they love and still plan for the future. Three of the members – Rosenberg, Dill and Blumenthal – work with Lots to Garden. Dill and Blumenthal have part-time jobs as well. Saddlemire runs Roundpoint Movies, making independent films and documentaries.

Satisfying jobs, all of them – but not something that’s going to make them rich.

“I never imagined that I’d be a homeowner,” Dill said. “This is probably the only way it was going to happen.”