When you sign a 12 month lease, you know more or less how much you'll spend towards housing for the next year and it's easy to accurately predict a cost ceiling.
When you own a home, you know the minimum you'll spend is the mortgage+taxes but in an unlucky year your AC goes out and you get a hole in the roof that insurance doesn't cover and suddenly you've spent 20k that you didn't plan on.
A house doesn't have that many things that can go wrong with it that would be unforseen expenses.
AC, water pipe leak, appliance breakdown, roof replacement. None of these cost above $8k, and for bigger things there is home insurance (e.g. tree fell on a house). Many of these things can be mitigated with a cheap fix that will last you those 12 months until you have the funds to do it properly.
Also, I see this sentiment a lot from people who have no problem dropping a $15-20k down payment on an car, but somehow spending that money for home maintenance is "scary" and "unpredictable".