Sober living facilities, three-quarter houses, drug recovery homes — there are a bunch of different names for the places recovering addicts go when it’s time to work toward independent living.

Call them whatever you want. The problem isn’t the variety of names — it’s the variety of standards by which some of the homes currently operate.

On Wednesday the Pennsylvania House took a step toward solving that problem, when members approved a bill that would set up uniform rules and regulations for the facilities in Pennsylvania. The bill has already been approved by the state Senate, and now heads to the desk of Gov. Tom Wolf, who has already signaled his intent to sign the regulations into law.

The legislation requires that any recovery home that receives federal or state funds be licensed through Pennsylvania’s Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs. It also lays out standards the homes have to meet — criminal background checks for employees, residents who are actually participating in treatment, etc. — to be certified. And it mandates that any patients whose treatment is funded with government money only be referred to certified facilities.

These are all good and necessary steps to take regarding the facilities, which until now have been allowed to operate basically however they please, so long as they fall within zoning guidelines set by local municipalities.

The lack of organizing principles and quality control measures has been so egregious that officials can’t even say for sure how many recovery houses currently operate in Pennsylvania or any one of its 67 counties.

The number of these recovery houses — homes where recovering addicts live together and share household duties — has been on the rise because of the nation’s ongoing opioid addiction and overdose crisis.

That’s a good thing, because recovering addicts need the services these facilities provide: they need to learn how to live independently, productively and drug-free.

It’s also been a very bad thing if you happen to be an addict who ended up in a recovery home with little or no supervision or support, a home that was overcrowded, or a home that became a magnet for drug dealers seeking to sabotage recovering addicts’ progress.

Enacting these regulations should help weed out unscrupulous providers that simply take patients’ money, put them in a house with other addicts, and leave them to their own devices. It should help put an end to misbehaving staffers and poorly-supervised patients who clash with neighbors.

This is a multi-million-dollar industry. In 2016 the state spent nearly $4 million on recovery house services — and that’s just for the business it did with about 60 facilities.

With that kind of money changing hands — and no end in sight to the nation’s struggle with opioids — recovering addicts and the general public need assurances that the industry has standardized rules and regulations.