Since the establishment of lunatic asylums from 1838, many critics have spoken out against the confinement and marginalization of the mentally ill people. In France as in other Western countries, voices are rising to promote alternative therapeutic solutions, specially accommodation in the heart of the city. But it was only after the Second World War that the hospital system was gradually reformed, in order to open it up more to society. In France, the “sectorisation” implemented from the 1960s and 1970s made it possible to decentralize psychiatric care. It is accompanied by a reduction in the number of hospital beds. This raises the question of patient accommodation. It is in this context that “therapeutic flats” were experimented in the 1970s and then institutionalized from the end of the 1980s. This article tries to think an object from the history of medicine with the approaches of urban history and the history of public policy. It traces the history of those therapeutic flats, mainly in France, then presents a specific case study, focused on the activity of an association called “Orloges”, created in 1980 in the Lyon city to facilitating access psychiatric patients in housing.